Despite her soap-opera descriptions of long walks and happy games of croquet, Turner shrewdly zeroes in on Power. “Like me, Tyrone was a prisoner of the romantic appearance that had made him a screen idol. I sympathized with his need to prove himself in roles of greater depth.” According to Turner, when she became pregnant, things began to come apart. “Two careers were on the line here, two big careers.” But her definitive statement about her romance with Tyrone Power was: “In my life I loved other men, but Tyrone was special. He was the one who broke my heart.” Guiles pointed out that they both had come from broken homes with dominant mother figures in the background and that they had “much in common.” He speculates that both needed to be surrounded by close friends and feel supported by associates, but that, conversely, both of them were very private people, “loners in a very real sense.” His definition of their closest bond was that they were “both sensualists.” (What they both really were was movie stars.)
When Turner had returned to Green Dolphin, one of life’s ironies occurred. Working on her set in a small role as a native girl was a beautiful young newcomer named Linda Christian. When Power went to Rome in 1948, he began dating Christian, and she became his second wife in January 1949. Publicity people, easily turned in a new direction, called it “the Wedding of the Century.” Power and Christian were married in a tenth-century Roman Catholic church, and during the enormous hoopla, back in America Turner rapidly moved on to her next. But while it lasted, the Power-Turner romance was a union made in fan heaven. For a romance that was covered by the press for every moment of its duration, there is a curious absence of any hard facts. Even the people who knew them well have never agreed on the curious case of the two glamorous movie stars and their fabled 1947 love affair. What is known is that it happened and it ended. Tyrone Power married Linda Christian. Lana Turner married Bob Topping. And the business went on.
The curious result of the Ty and Lana shenanigans was that it was Lana Turner who paid. The romance hurt her reputation, not his. She was viewed as unreliable. She had jeopardized the budget and filming schedule of her movie by recklessly flying off to see her lover in Mexico. She had pursued him, and he had jilted her. He was just another whim in her long line of lovers. Ever so subtly, the double standard was applied to Lana Turner’s romance with Tyrone Power, and from that time on, her publicity became more negative. The press began to present her as a spoiled, reckless wanton who was having an affair while unwed and—worst of all—who just didn’t care about decent behavior. Although it was the forthcoming Johnny Stompanato crisis that took Turner to the bottom, her prior romance with Tyrone Power marks the beginning of her publicity decline.
Perhaps to stabilize her image (not to mention generate some pizzazz at the box office), MGM cast Turner with two former co-stars who were two of their biggest names. (It’s also possible that these two men, who were aging, could use the boost her sex appeal would bring to their own careers.) First was Cass Timberlane (1947) with Spencer Tracy and next was Homecoming (1948) with Clark Gable. Turner and Tracy are good together. Although seemingly an odd couple, they have fun with each other. He is the wise old man who can appreciate what she’s got, and she’s a wised-up young girl who can give him what he deserves. (Turner collapses in giggles while Tracy tickles her and appreciatively eyes her in tight jeans.) Turner’s role seems to restore some of the kittenish fun of her first years at Metro, as she plays softball and appears to be down-to-earth. At the same time, it weaves in what Turner now represents to people. She becomes restless as Tracy’s wife and embarks on a would-be affair with Zachary Scott.
Homecoming was her third movie with Gable. A mature and touching film, it is a story about the adjustments married couples had to make to separation during World War II. Gable plays a society doctor for whom a country club dance is more important than helping the poor. Anne Baxter is that familiar soap-opera creature, the doctor’s wife, wearing fur and pearls and standing nobly by the cocktail shaker, keeping the chintz curtains fresh while he fights the war. Turner’s role is a down-to-earth nurse with a crusading spirit, a decidedly deglamorized role with no wardrobe but a pair of battle fatigues. She’s a noble spirit, but she falls for a married man—so she dies.
The old Turner-Gable magic is still present, only now they are equals. Turner is no longer the little girl flirting deliciously with the King. Now she is Lana Turner, his equal in star magnitude and sexual magnetism. The postwar Gable was older looking, sadder faced, but he is warmed up and teased by the laughing Turner, who is still easy and natural in front of the cameras. She was still the right kind of fun-loving companion for Gable. When they go out to bathe in a Roman ruin, he’s shy and she’s bold, a good reversal of their former screen selves. In a scene redolent of wartime democracy, the director (Turner’s old friend Mervyn LeRoy) plays two of America’s biggest sex symbols for laughs, treating them like human beings, real people, instead of movie stars.
Not everyone had LeRoy’s sense of what to do with Turner, however. She was becoming difficult to cast. Magnetic and disturbing, she had become a powerful image. An undercurrent of violence and recklessness (which seemed fatally linked to her sex appeal) became more overt. By now MGM realized fully that Lana Turner was not simply a product of their system. She was “Lana,” a name that despite her popularity never caught on as a name for babies. What sensible mother wanted a “Lana” on her hands? Turner was no role model.
This was a part of her movie star development that hadn’t been fully envisioned by the studio bosses. Lana Turner had become a household name, which wasn’t itself unusual for a movie star, but she was a household name associated with questionable offscreen behavior, a complicated personal life, and a devotion to glamour that seemed just a little too much for the average person to condone. Audiences wrote in to complain about her “morality.” MGM solved this problem by casting her as a villainess. As a change of pace, she played Milady deWinter in a lavish costume drama based on Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1948). Turner does full justice to the juicy role of a truly evil woman. (“Beware of strange men, dark roads, and lonely places. That woman will destroy you.”) Except for her brief appearance in DuBarry Was a Lady, Musketeers was her first Technicolor film. Fans turned out in droves to see their girl in living color—a sight worth waiting for.*
By then Turner had become indifferent to filmmaking. She began to fight MGM, initially going on suspension over her role as Milady, refusing to play in the lavish costume drama. Studio pressure convinced her to cooperate, however, although Louis B. Mayer was rumored to be almost wishing he were rid of her and the ongoing hoo-hah of her private life. Mayer had stayed calm through her early romantic escapades, but in 1948 she garnered even more negative headlines in a sensational affair with the much-married millionaire Bob Topping. When she announced her intention to marry Topping (her third), the press rose to the occasion like barracuda to the bait. Suddenly, she became a figure of their ridicule. They mockingly described Lana as having been “desolate after her divorce,” as she had been “left with nothing but her $226,000 per year salary, a daughter named Cheryl, and half a dozen casual beaux.” Turner’s groom was scathingly referred to by Life magazine as “considered very talented by café society … because he inherited $7 million and plays a fine game of golf.”
Paying no attention, Turner happily married Topping in May 1948, following completion of Musketeers. The wedding itself was thoroughly mocked by Life in a story entitled “For the Fourth and Definitely Last Time.”* Turner’s lifelong friend Billy Wilkerson acted as host for the reception and also as Topping’s best man. Completely ignoring his close connection with Turner and her career, Life pointed out that Wilkerson “moved in upper circles by virtue of having risen from speakeasy manager to publisher of the Hollywood Reporter—an expert on marriages, having engaged in five of them himself.”
Despite the media’s cruelty and cynicism, the bride was starry-eyed and beautiful. Wearing champagne lace, fortified with a $30,000 t
rousseau by Don Loper, standing in front of a bower covered with nine dozen gardenias and her daughter Cheryl as flower girl, Turner did as she always did. She went forward confidently. “This is forever,” Bob Topping was heard to remark to her. “Yes, darling,” she replied.
Obviously not needing money, Turner took the first vacation from work she had known since she was barely sixteen years old. She was off the screen some time, returning partly out of boredom, partly out of studio pressure, and partly, it was said, out of disillusionment with her latest marriage. Looking tense and overweight, she returned to MGM, but not until she had divorced Bob Topping in December 1952 after officially separating from him in July 1951.
Turner’s first film after her return, panned at the time and even disowned by its director, George Cukor, is an unexpectedly mature story and suggests that her career could have taken on new depth. A Life of Her Own (1950) both uses the conventions of the woman’s film and works against them, letting darkness and despair settle over its plot like a great blight. As model Lily James, Turner creates a character that everyone could see was closely identified with her offscreen self. By virtue of hard work and determination—not to mention the looks of a Lana Turner—Lily James makes it to the top of the cat-eat-cat New York modeling world. She is no starry-eyed kid, and she has no interest in romance: “I’ve had men buzzing around me since I was fourteen years old. I want to be somebody. All I have is myself and how I look. I’ll work hard.” To her fans, Turner seemed to be talking to them about herself.
Still beautiful, if looking slightly more mature, Turner now had to face the problems of the Hollywood studio system’s impending collapse. She was a top star and a big box office attraction, yet A Life of Her Own didn’t fare well financially. Furthermore, the bosses of MGM now really understood they had created a monster. By ruthlessly exploiting her personal troubles and incorporating what the public learned about her offscreen life into her screen roles, they had inadvertently painted Turner into a corner. And she wasn’t getting any younger. Suddenly, she had nowhere to go in movies except into roles in which she played an actress, a star, a terribly rich woman, a sinner. No Come Back, Little Sheba or putting on a false nose and playing a female Cyrano for her. She could now be cast only as Lana Turner, the fusion of reel/real icon she had become. It was no longer possible for the public to see her as anything but her image. Realizing they were carrying an expensive, hard-to-cast, potentially scandal-causing aging star on their rosters, MGM began making long-range plans to dump her.
Before giving up on their investment entirely, MGM first tried to restore a lighthearted quality to Turner’s image. They returned her to musicals. The first of these is a candidate for the worst film she ever made while under contract at MGM, a farce called Mr. Imperium (1951). Turner played (surprise!) a Hollywood movie star opposite Ezio Pinza, the opera singer who had made a romantic splash in Broadway’s South Pacific. Before Mr. Imperium could ruin her forever, she was rapidly cast in a musical film that was, whatever its imperfections, far superior to the Pinza debacle. MGM’s 1952 version of the durable Merry Widow is the Neiman Marcus of film musicals. It’s stuffed with expensive furniture, gold-trimmed uniforms, sterling-silver place settings, ostrich-feathered costumes, and jeweled knickknacks. This version of The Merry Widow, pairing Lana Turner with the handsome Fernando Lamas, was not like the von Stroheim version, with its decadence and sense of European rot. Nor was it like the 1934 version directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier. That film was all bubbles and wit, as sophisticated and subtle as only Lubitsch can be. But although this version may not be vintage champagne, it isn’t beer either. More of a good red, with plenty of body and a good pedigree. There are those who feel that the Turner version of The Merry Widow is more fizzle than fizz, but in terms of beauty of production, it excels. Visions of the dancers at Maxim’s, gorgeous in scarlet and brilliant black, and the pink, white, and gold of the waltzers in a spectacular final number linger in a viewer’s memory. The public turned the film into a semi-hit, although critics joked that since Turner had just divorced Topping, the title should have been The Merry Grass Widow.
One of Turner’s best roles was that of, what else, a famous movie star, in The Bad and the Beautiful with Kirk Douglas.
Turner’s next film performance might be called the best she ever gave. It was the film that MGM was built to make and Vincente Minnelli was meant to direct. It might even be the role that Lana Turner was born to play: movie star Georgia Lorrison in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). It is superbly dir- ected by Minnelli, a man who knew Hollywood. He re-creates atmosphere—a typical Hollywood party, a sneak preview, shots of hundreds of different types of staircases stored in a studio warehouse, a two-bit agent who breaks down and weeps when his client lands a job, and a fast-talking sharpie who rents leopard costumes. (“Plenty of fright. You’ll need to add shoulder pads, of course.”) Turner was given top billing in an impressive cast that included Kirk Douglas, Dick Powell, Walter Pidgeon, Barry Sullivan, Gloria Grahame, and Gilbert Roland. Since the public’s idea of the private Lana Turner was now fixed as a spoiled glamour girl with an excessive love life, audiences easily believed her as Lorrison. In addition, the part itself, loosely based on the life of Diana Barrymore, was one Turner could give everything she had—and she did. Her Georgia is a lush with one foot in the gutter when she meets Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas), a Hollywood hustler who has gate-crashed and gambled his way into picture power. Georgia is the kind of girl who is willing to sleep with Shields just because it’s 4:00 a.m. and she wants to turn the light out. However, he sees her potential: “When you’re on the screen, no matter how bad you are, no one looks at anyone but you.”
Lana Turner is excellent in The Bad and the Beautiful. For once, a glamorous movie star is played by one. She understands the role, and she makes it hers. Yet she wasn’t nominated for an Oscar, and MGM refused to reconsider her potential. It was the moment for her—if recognized as the actress she might have become, things could have changed. But no. Despite her success in The Bad and the Beautiful, MGM persisted in its plan to make Turner into a musical comedy star and lighten her image. Her next, Latin Lovers (1953), was supposed to be a comedy with a little music—a dollop of whipped cream atop a fizzy soda. What resulted was more like a Bromo-Seltzer, with no relief in sight.
From her return to the screen in A Life of Her Own through Latin Lovers, Turner had been cast as a top photographer’s model, a movie star (twice), and a very, very rich woman (twice). (In Latin Lovers she had allegedly inherited $37 million, which did a lot for her wardrobe changes.) There wasn’t any way to present Lana Turner as a nice girl at a soda fountain anymore. For her remaining movies at MGM, she would be: the kind of bad girl who is euphemistically called “an adventuress” but who is picked up on the streets to give some clarification; a Damascan goddess of love; a shady lady with a mink and a past; a man-hunting British lady; and a mistress of King Henry II. Such roles would be her fate until she left MGM in 1956. She would be always sexy, never ordinary, never very human, and always connected to scandal. MGM had shaped her and let her private life define her. Now they couldn’t figure out any other way to go.
Several major Hollywood stars (Gene Kelly, among others) were now going overseas to make films and take advantage of a new American tax law. The studios, too, were interested in filming in Europe, both for the box office draw of location shooting and to use their own frozen foreign funds in film production. Turner joined the parade of big-name stars who made films overseas, going first to Italy for The Flame and the Flesh, and then to Holland and England for Betrayed. Accompanying her on this sojourn was the handsome actor who would become her next husband, Lex Barker. (“We’re just good friends,” said Lana and Lex as they departed California.) The Flame and the Flesh (1954) gave fans a brunette Lana Turner in a film that attempted to capture the lustiness of the popular foreign films then flooding the United States movie houses. It was shot largely in
Naples, and its location footage was the best thing about it.
Turner was then reunited with her popular co-star Clark Gable for the fourth and last time in her next film, Betrayed (1954). The main betrayal is by the screenplay, which badly lets down its two durable stars. Turner and Gable seem tired, unable to generate their former sexual magnetism. Although she hasn’t aged since Homecoming, he definitely has. They look at each other with dull eyes, their former secret twinkles and sense of mutual fun gone. He’s no longer the tomcat on the prowl and she’s not the cute, kittenish kid. Alas, they don’t even seem to be Clark Gable and Lana Turner. They look like two people who just want to get it over with, put their feet up, and have a cup of coffee.*
After a long “companionship,” Turner took Lex Barker as her next husband on September 8, 1953, and, just to make sure it would last, wed him again in a big Christmas ceremony on December 25. (She would divorce him in June 1957 and learn years later that he had sexually abused her daughter.*)
Next for the sinking Turner would be one of those films that inspire critics to think they’re comedians. The Prodigal (1955) is ready-made for the one-line put-down, and Turner’s role is one of the silliest in film history. It was the fate of most Hollywood sex symbols to eventually be cast as a goddess. Rita Hayworth played Terpsichore and Ava Gardner played Venus, but these roles were in light musical comedies. Turner was saddled with playing the High Priestess of Astarte back in old Damascus (700 B.C.) in a script that thought it was for real. It can only be to Turner’s professional credit that, knowing the film was a joke, she suited up in her goddess beads and walked through her role, giving the film all her glamour but none of herself. Her entrance is another one of her great movie walks. To the jangle of pagan music, she appears from behind a gaudy curtain and, with torches in her hands, undulates around a claustrophobic tent wearing baubles, bangles, and beads. “She is not a follower of Jehovah,” hisses a witness, by way of explanation.
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